‘The Song I Didn’t Write’ by Too Much Joy | New Album, ‘All These CENSORED Feelings’
Exclusive track premiere of ‘The Song I Didn’t Write’ by Too Much Joy, taken from the deluxe version of their latest album. Retitled to ‘All These CENSORED Feelings,’ it will be released March 31st via Propeller Sound Recordings.
A deluxe version of the album is coming out on March 31st, with thirteen additional tunes recorded at the same time, including a few of the fan commissions that helped fund the whole thing in the first place. New single ‘The Song I Didn’t Write’ is dedicated to Chip Turner, who paid $1,000 for a custom B-side but then told the band to just keep the money and spend their time working on the album. The lyric was inspired by a lot of verses Tim Quirk wrote for other songs but then crossed out before sharing with the rest of the band. He’s pretty sure it’s better to be a kind friend than a brave artist, but sometimes he has his doubts.
“If I knew how to avoid these fucking feelings / then I’d be a very different kind of man,” runs the first line of the title track of the second Too Much Joy album of this cursed millennium. Lucky for us the band isn’t made up of the kind of men who can manage that trick. Instead, on the triumphant ‘All These Fucking Feelings’—the band’s seventh full-length LP—Too Much Joy holds true to what it’s always done, in the 1980s, 1990s, and off and on in the years in-between, as its members worked real jobs and formed families and grew from punkish, prankish suburban dreamers to adults who have indisputably seen some shit. Through it all, no matter what the world throws at them, Too Much Joy still mines the confusion, anxiety, rage, and joy that all of us feel. Then, through the messy process of band democracy, transmutes it into rock and roll of uncommon passion, power, and insight.
Facing feelings, cursing feelings, shouting feelings over propulsive drums and unreasonably loud guitars, sneaking feelings into singalongs so gum-in-hair sticky that it might take a couple choruses before the people singing along realize they’re singing something raw and resonant and true: this has been the Too Much Joy approach for decades. Here’s a band that got ‘90s crowds to shout “La-la-la-la-la-la lonely,” pandemic-era streamers to belt “Men like Uncle Watson / will destroy us in the end,” and now All These Fucking Feelings listeners to holler “Talking about what pricks we were / and how much better we wanted to be.” (And that’s not even getting into this new LP’s synthy, sour-candy pop beauty about the lure of the void.)
The deluxe version of ‘All These Fucking Feelings’ includes an entire bonus disc of outtakes and b-sides, many of them commissioned by and written about Too Much Joy fans. Making good art using a patronage model is a challenge, but not an impossible one, as we hope these songs demonstrate. It requires an odd balance of wanting to please one’s donors while also realizing you have to not give a shit whether or not they actually like the results, and that turns out to be a pretty inspirational way of creating.
Too Much Joy is a punk-pop band of some minor renown. Some of that renown was due to their music, which included semi-hits such as ‘Crush Story,’ ‘Donna Everywhere,’ and ‘That’s a Lie’ — a cover of the LL Cool J tune that featured the man himself in the music video, which actually got played quite a bit during daylight hours on MTV back when they did that sort of thing.
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